Zen and the Art of Knowledge Maintenance, Part III: Our Digital DNA

As I mentioned earlier, one of the best ways to preserve an idea is to share it as widely as possible. This sort of broadcasting used to cost a lot of money, back when that meant printing materials to distribute or buying airtime on radio or television, but the Internet has given us a way to exchange ideas with people all over the world for a relative pittance. Alas, this is precisely the reason we have spam, since it costs virtually nothing to send an email, but with the bad comes the good: the Internet has become mankind’s de facto library, albeit with a few gated wings here and there.

This in turn is a major motivation for storing knowledge in digital formats, since this makes it possible to send them to others over a network. The fact that we can download books, photos, music, movies, television shows, software, and data of every imaginable sort is rapidly making the older delivery methods–printed materials, over-the-air broadcasting, CDs, DVDs, even Blu-Ray discs–obsolete. The video rental store as we know it is going away, and it’s hard to find a dedicated music store these days. Can it be long before bookstores face that fate? Between the Kindle, Nook, Kobo, and iBooks it looks like new publications are being offered in a digital format, downloadable from an online store.

There’s a space-saving advantage that can’t be overlooked. Words on pages, bound together in books, clustered on shelves in a library take up a lot of real estate, but you can store billions of them on a mobile phone. Any endeavour to archive the collected works of humankind has to take that sort of advantage very seriously–all the books and other text items in the world’s largest library, the US Library of Congress, would fit in just 20 terabytes of digital storage, which at today’s prices would set you back a mere $1,000 and fit in a box the size of a typical desktop computer.

It’s the ability to index and search a digital document that really appeals to me, though. I’m a techie, and many of the books on my shelves these days are reference books or manuals of one sort or another, and they’re quite often 600+ pages in length, causing my bookshelves to sag and groan under their weight. The table of contents and the index are sometimes helpful to find something I need to know, but truth be told, it’s faster and easier for me to craft a search with Google than it is for me to get up from my desk, find the book on the shelf behind me, consult the index and try to locate the reference I’m looking for. If I had that book in a digital format that I could search, I’d recycle the print copy in a heartbeat.

Most modern filesystems also support tagging, which lets you associate some metadata with any file of any type, not just text documents, to make it easier to search your filesystem for relevant files. Some file types incorporate their own searchable metadata, like information about the musician or album in an MP3 file, or the name of the TV episode in an AVI file, or the make and model of the camera that took the photo in a JPEG. Tools like the Mac’s built-in Spotlight index all of this metadata to turn your filesystem into a searchable database, rather than just a filing cabinet.

The more fundamental benefit that comes with putting knowledge into a digital form is that it tends to make it more “fluid”, making the content more malleable, and causing us to think about the content before the form. Consider that documents were at one time quite literally chiseled in stone or baked in fired clay, making them very difficult to edit. As paper offered a somewhat more disposable medium the writing process became a bit easier–botched pages could be replaced without scrapping the entire document. But it took the advent of the word processor to free us, ultimately, from the need to get it right the first time. The ability to write a rough draft, or flesh out an outline, or revisit a document later to insert or remove a bit of text–even correct a single typo–has given writers more creative control over their work.

The same sort of benefit can be seen in fields like photography, where the shift to digital image processing has given photographers a level of control over the finished product unlike anything that’s come before. It’s not just that the photos are stored in a digital format, it’s that consequently a photographer can see the result immediately on the camera’s display. Combine that with the fact that no film is wasted and you’ve got a risk-free environment for photographers to experiment with different settings of aperture, shutter speed, etc. Photographers these days also know they can edit their photos later, which removes some of the pressure to get the perfect shot (perfectionists aside ). The so-called “digital darkroom” is to photographers what the word processor is to writers.

Having materials like photos in digital form lets you both preserve them against the ravages of time and repair some of the damage that may already have occurred. Those slides from the 1960’s that have been sitting in a box in the attic all this time have been gradually darkening as the chemicals break down, and some may even be completely black by now, but if there’s any chance of recovering the original image it will be with the help of a good scanner and capable photo editing software. Photographic prints aren’t much safer, particularly if they’ve been sitting in a box that wasn’t designed for storing photos–the acid in the paper of a typical cardboard box will be released over the years through outgassing, and any photos in that box will suffer for it; professional archival boxes use acid-free paper instead.

In the days before digital photography you had to live with your mistakes, as well. You were stuck with the composition you chose at the time you took the picture, and there was no way to crop the photo or remove that inconvenient thumb that somehow ended up in the frame. Then there were the times you’d take the film in for processing and get back a set of photos that just didn’t look as vivid as you remembered, possibly because the developer botched the job or used inferior paper, or because the film you bought was nearing its expiry date. Going through old photos today, I find myself doing a lot of that sort of correction, restoring blue skies and turquoise oceans that look dull and grey in the prints. I repaired an old baby photo that was badly torn in several places and creased with wrinkles–something that just wasn’t possible in the pre-digital world.

Photos aren’t the only things you can preserve this way, of course. Look at all the comic book collectors who diligently seal their comics in mylar bags to keep the pages from yellowing and fading. Scan a comic book and you preserve those pages for your digital collection. There’s a newspaper clipping my wife tacked up on her wall about five years ago–a “History of Christmas Traditions” article from the Vancouver Sun–that I’ve watched age over time in its unprotected state, and it drove home just how fragile things like newsprint really are. Scan them, though, and the digital images won’t age a day.

A look through the garage a little while ago turned up a bunch of old audio cassettes and VHS tapes, too, which will soon be at risk. It’s not just that the magnetic tape is drying up and becoming more brittle, it’s that it’s becoming harder to find equipment to play these tapes in the first place. I don’t care so much about tapes of material that I’ve long since replaced with versions on CD or DVD, but homemade recordings in particular deserve to live on. Think about those camcorder videos from the 90’s and their odd 8mm analog format–get those tapes digitized while your old camcorder still works, or else you’ll be hunting on eBay for something to play those tapes. Vinyl records are in a slightly better position because of the fact that they’re favoured by audiophiles, and a new generation likes them for their larger cover art. This ensures that there will still be turntables available to play them on for some time to come.

It’s the portability of digital media, though, that most people appreciate. The fact that a digital file can be copied from one device to another has been the bane of groups like the MPAA and RIAA, but it’s precisely what makes them popular with Average Joe–you can copy your music, your videos, your documents, and so on from your desktop to your laptop to your mobile device. For the purpose of perpetuating knowledge, the ready ability to copy data to many locations around the world is a tremendous reproductive advantage. The current controversy over WikiLeaks and its release of sensitive documents is an instructive example of how difficult it can be to quash the flow of information that can be so readily communicated in digital form. Indeed, protocols like BitTorrent were designed explicitly with the goal of decentralizing the distribution of data, so no single computer needs to store the data. In effect, such torrents form a network of offsite backups for the data they mirror.

Finally, there’s the integration benefit–the ability to create “mashups” that allow us to visualize or interact with information in new ways. We used to have photo albums for our family photos, record collections for our music, bookshelves for our reading materials and another set of shelves for our videos, but there was no easy way to mash these things up until we converted them all to digital formats. These days the notion of a “family album” is more than just an assortment of photos, it’s more like a digital scrapbook with comments as metadata for each picture. Home movies can be linked to these entries, along with music to establish the mood of a period. Modern genealogy software, for instance, lets you associate media files with people, places, and events, so that it effectively becomes the family album, a way to explore your roots in rich, sensory detail, held together in context.

The binary world of ones and zeroes has rapidly evolved to become the DNA of modern civilization, a universal language for communicating our thoughts, our ideas, our knowledge, and our experiences to others. We can argue about the best file format for video, or the best word processor to use for writing screenplays, but underneath it all we’re just quibbling over bits and bytes. The move to digital form is do or die for much of our knowledge, our history, and our culture. Up next: the stuff that won’t survive.

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